The Biggest Bluff: Control, Chance, and How the Psychology of Poker Illuminates the Art of Thriving Through Uncertainty [Archive.org URL]

Over and over, people would overestimate the degree of control they had over events — smart people, people who excelled at many things, people who should have known better… The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and the worse their decisions became… The illusion of control is what prevented real control over the game from emerging — and before long, the quality of people’s decisions deteriorated. They did what worked in the past, or what they had decided would work — and failed to grasp that the circumstances had shifted so that a previously successful strategy was no longer so. People failed to see what the world was telling them when that message wasn’t one they wanted to hear. They liked being the rulers of their environment. When the environment knew more than they did — well, that was no good at all. Here was the cruel truth: we humans too often think ourselves in firm control when we are really playing by the rules of chance.

A basic shortcoming of our neural wiring is that we can’t quite grasp probabilities. Statistics are completely counterintuitive: our brains are simply not cut out, evolutionarily, to understand that inherent uncertainty. There were no numbers or calculations in our early environment — just personal experience and anecdote. We didn’t learn to deal with information presented in an abstract fashion, such as tigers are incredibly rare in this part of the country, and you have a 2 percent chance of encountering one, and an even lower chance of being attacked; we learned instead to deal with brute emotions such as last night there was a tiger here and it looked pretty damn scary.

Some of us imbue probability with emotion. It becomes luck: chance that has suddenly acquired a valence, positive or negative, fortuitous or unfortunate. Good or bad luck. A lucky or unlucky break. Some of us invest luck with meaning, direction, and intent. It becomes fate, karma, kismet — chance with an agenda. It was meant to be. Some even go a step further: predestination. It was always meant to be, and any sense of control or free will we may think we have is pure illusion.

Our experiences trump everything else, but mostly, those experiences are incredibly skewed: they teach us, but they don’t teach us well. It’s why disentangling chance from skill is so difficult in everyday decisions: it’s a statistical undertaking, and one we are not normally equipped to deal with.
— Maria Konnikova

Millennia of evolution have hardly allayed our preference for anecdote over probability — a failure to internalize mathematical rules known in psychology as the description‐experience gap, leading to what the Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has memorably described as our tendency to draw our confidence in our beliefs not from the quality of the evidence but from the coherence of the story we have constructed. Numberless studies have demonstrated that the human distaste for numbers leads people to make decisions based not on the data they are shown but on the pattern-recognition of non-representative past experience we call intuition, gut feeling, hunch.

A central paradox magnifying our ineptitude at parsing probabilities is that, in everyday life, we only tend to notice chance when the dice roll counter to our expectations — we are congenitally blind to the silent tilling work of randomness for as long as it smooths reality in our favor. But the moment life grows rough and the topography of reality becomes unfamiliar, we begin coloring chance with emotional interpretation
— Maria Popova